Disclaimer: it's summer, we are under a really long heat wave in Spain, so I didn't feel like moving from the couch (you will understand later :D)

Yesterday evening I was laying on the couch surfing Amazon website using an old laptop (very old) that I barely use, and at some point, I took an screenshot I needed to share with a friend via corporate email... (my idea was to send it to my email account, and this morning, send it from my corporate account)

Anyway, after taking the screenshot I realized:

• I was no logged in gmail, dropbox, github, etc , and in order to login, I would need a token from my cellphone (and my smartphone was in a different room!!!)
• No USB drives around
• The image sharing alternatives that I know of, requires you to create an user and login… Too much for a onetime thing

So I decided to use pastebin to store the image in text format:

1. Take the screenshot (I used scrot, feel free to use any other tool…) : scrot -d 5 ~/amazon.jpg

2. Gzip the file: gzip ~/amazon.jpg

3. Convert to base64: base64 ~/amazon.jpg.gz > ~/amazon.b64

4. Cat the file and paste the (long) result into pastebin and write down the url

This morning from my corporate laptop:

1. Download the file from pastebin (save it as amazon.b64)

2. Set file format UNIX... For instance, using vi: ESC:set ff=unix

3. Decode it:base64 -d amazon.b64 > amazon.jpg.gz

4. Unzip it: gunzip amazon.jpg.gz

Et voila, we have the same picture….

I know this doesn't seem very useful (or yes, who knows?) but you might follow the same approach for other things… For instance, I use pretty much the same thing in Python for embedding an old version of pexpect module in my scripts

Later